Las Vegans may remember Melissa McCarty from her 2005-07 stint as a reporter and anchor on KTNV Channel 13. But viewers likely didn’t realize the anxiety that lay behind McCarty’s carefully modulated delivery, detailed in a recently released memoir. Read More

When I made my predictions for 2012 in January (VegasSeven.com/TechPredictions2012), the Las Vegas tech scene was just starting to take off, Facebook was still a private company, and it seemed like Internet poker in Nevada was just around the corner. Now the local scene is more mature, Facebook’s rocky IPO frustrated some investors but didn’t dent the site’s popularity, and it still seems like Internet poker in Nevada is just around the Read More

I love film scores—enough to have written a chapter on them in the 2008 Time Out book, 1000 Songs to Change Your Life. (There are a few copies left on Amazon! Makes a great gift!) I like the way that film music takes on its own life and its own characteristics when stripped from its source, and the best composers of the stuff currently working—Alexandre Desplat, Michael Giacchino, Carter Burwell—slot nicely into iTunes playlists alongside Radiohead, Explosions in the Sky and other artists who merely sound like they’re scoring for Read More

Sometimes even the most innocent stories manage to take subtle cheap shots at Las Vegas. In a recent Los Angeles Times article about the Las Vegas Astronomical Society’s quest to establish an observatory complex atop Mount Potosi, writer John Read More

Community and culture. For the last year and a half, we’ve heard the continual drumbeat of downtown’s resurgence—a beat that has quickly echoed into other parts of the city. But how do you maintain any sense of connectivity in a continuously growing community of entrepreneurs, technologists, artists and cultural enthusiasts? With an app, of Read More

I would rather that Ghost Bikes the website didn’t exist. It’s not that I have anything against the page; it’s well-written and comprehensive. But it wouldn’t be here if not for the existence of ghost bikes, white-painted bicycles placed on city streets near where cyclists have been struck and killed. The Ghost Bikes site provides a global map of these memorials (including one in Las Vegas), a listing of cyclist-safety events (most of them appear to be in New York City) and, sadly, a necessary how-to guide for preparing and placing a ghost bike for a fallen Read More

Perhaps nowhere in Southern Nevada signifies the boom-to-bust of the last 20 years better than Lake Las Vegas. The luxury development was literally carved out of the desert, leaving a jarring disconnect between the man-made oasis and the barren terrain surrounding it. Photographer Michael Light beautifully captures this dichotomy on DesignObserver.com, showing half-developed hillsides juxtaposed with million-dollar homes and stark Read More

Whether you’re a tinkerer or fancy yourself a serious inventor, the perfect opportunity to show off your creations is arriving early next year. The first Las Vegas Mini Maker Faire will be held at the Historic Fifth Street School on Feb. 2, celebrating the do-it-yourself Read More

I don’t have a good way of explaining what makes Pronunciation Manual, a YouTube-based parody of the sexless and robotic pronunciation guides that afflict our online dictionaries, funny or useful in the slightest—other than to say “ty-wy-woo-ley-guh-hoodey.” According to the manual, that’s how you pronounce “twilight.” “Arianna Huffington” is “Nardo Fa-fa-fa-fa-fafa-fa.” “Schadenfreude” is “skooden frooty,” naturally. And the manual isn’t ashamed to tell you when it’s not sure about the correct way to say something, like “armoire.” (“You serious? Of course I know what it Read More

We’re told the days of the mob in Las Vegas are long gone, but they are resurrected every Tuesday night on CBS in Vegas. Michael Chiklis, who plays mobster-turned-casino boss Vincent Savino in the fictional TV drama, was profiled in the Dec. 2 Los Angeles Times. The Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning actor discusses whom his character is based on, how 1960s-era Fremont Street was re-created in Southern California and the legacy of gangsters coming to Las Vegas to become legitimized Read More

With all the current interest in the Curiosity rover, the promise of new Star Wars movies and the looming end of the Long Count calendar, it’s only natural that our fancies should turn, once again, to outer space. There’s lots of, y’know, space out there—more than enough to contain our ever-expanding hubris. But how do we get there? Do we hit up Elon Musk? Do we put a lot of balloons on an Aeron chair? Do we go to the middle of the desert, put tinfoil on our heads and prepare for Read More

It’s a story consisting of dominance and deception, cheating and racism, mobsters and celebrities—and even 20 years later, it still captures much of the public’s imagination. Reporter Kevin Cook takes a look at the Jerry Tarkanian era at UNLV in the December issue of Playboy, beginning with the social climate in Las Vegas before his arrival in 1972 and concluding with his tumultuous departure from UNLV in Read More

By now you might have forgotten about Pete Wells’ scathing New York Times review of UNLV alum Guy Fieri’s Times Square restaurant. In the days after its Nov. 13 publication, Web readers shared it with an uncommon zeal, hailing it as pure genius. You’ve probably also forgotten the smaller surge of pro-Fieri Tweets and comments that followed. But the flap over Fieri’s American Kitchen & Bar is instructive for those who want to understand why the public level of discourse is at its current Read More